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lost-in-the-land-of-stories · 3 months ago

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Elisabeth de Musical 2025 Review (DeLaMar, 22-03-25 Previews)

Hello friends, been a while since I did serious Elisabeth posting, but GUESS WHO WENT TO SEE THE NEW DUTCH SHOW DURING PREVIEWS >:3

I figured it might be nice to have a bit of a report/review for if you’re considering going to see this version of the show, especially if you have to come from abroad to do so. I will do a spoiler-free section first, and then hide my spoiler thoughts under the cut (just a heads-up, I wrote 2000 words of just rambling thoughts immediately after coming home last weekend so this post is LongTM).

Spoiler Free Review

I was really excited to watch a fresh take on Elisabeth from within the area that just takes over the German-language staging, and I was not disappointed. This take on Elisabeth makes some big swings and changes and while there are a few I have complicated thoughts on, overall I really liked it.

The cast is incredibly talented, and the creative direction was fresh and interesting and thoughtful. The choices made feel deliberate and interesting, the new sets are both beautiful and combine having to be moved because the show is touring with not looking lazy/confined by the fact they’re for a tour (in case you’re wondering, yes that’s shade on the non-existent sets and boring screens they used in the previous German-language tour and the endless concerts). It still is a little pared-down, don’t expect 04-05 Vienna opulence, but the choices made feel more like they were made for creative reasons than simply so the show is moveable. There are screens, yes, but they are used in interesting fashion, and the sets that are used call back to older stagings in interesting ways as well as bringing a fresh new approach. I would love a bit more opulence, but I won’t deny that watching the Toho and Takarazuka productions a lot specifically primes you to look for that.

The costumes I am a bit more in the middle about; there are fewer and they are more simple at times than I would like, but there are also a number of really beautiful costumes and I once again do understand why they did what they did; it’s a deliberate choice, and I respect that. The one thing I’ll say here and not in spoilers because I have the picture up anyway; I fucking LOVE that they gave de Dood back his red coat. Original Dutch Death Stanley Burleson had a red coat and devilish motif, and I utterly love that they brought that back for Milan. It feels a little bit uniquely Dutch, I don’t recall any other recurring productions that use it a lot, and that makes me immensely fond of it.

The cast is absolutely incredible and I have essentially nothing but good things to say. Danique Dusée is amazing as Young Sisi, she has a really incredible way of bringing both a real boisterous youthful energy while also pulling of incredible vulnerability, without coming across as helpless. It was impressive to see, and I really enjoyed her Sisi. I also really like her singing, though I miss the very high soprano type Sisi vocals, her voice is beautiful and I enjoyed it immensely. I also really loved getting to see Pia Douwes actually performing Elisabeth, instead of just singing. I’ve seen her in concert a bunch of times now but this hit so different. While you can tell that she is getting on in years and her voice is perhaps not quite what it once was, I super just do not care. Her acting is truly amazing and you can just feel how much she’s lived and embodied this part. I really appreciated that they used a switch-cast, it created a very interesting change in dynamic with Death, and it was overall very well done (minor spoiler, I suppose, but it’s relevant to know that this isn’t like the concert versions and the switch takes place at the end of act 1, during the reprise of Ich Gehör nur Mir).

I loved Milan van Waardenburg as de Dood, he’s super bitchy and sassy and FUN, and as I already said the red coat just, chef’s kiss. His voice is beautiful, he hits both beautiful low notes and insanely high ones, and his chemistry with both Pia and Danique was amazing.

As for the rest of the cast, I really liked William Spaaij as Lucheni, he’s very fun but also gets very dark at times. My one complaint is that his Italian pronunciation isn’t that great, and it would have been nice to see an actual Italian as Lucheni for ONCE, but that’s not his fault. Guido Gottenbos’ Franz-Joseph is incredibly sympathetic (if terribly foolish) and his voice is really warm and beautiful. I don’t usually have a lot of sympathy for Franz, but he really sold it. And he somehow worked with both young and older Sisi, which I’ve certainly seem happen differently. AND ANN VAN DEN BROECK AS SOPHIE!!!!! Holy hells she was perfect and I adore her and it’s no surprise that my favourite European Sisi would also be my favourite European Sophie, I suppose. She sells the humanity of Sophie so well, and while she is terribly cruel you can see that she doesn’t mean badly. Chef’s kiss. No notes. Please, I want to see her play Old Sisi someday as well. Ronald Jorritsma was a very endearing Rudolf, even though his role was significantly cut down (not in time on stage, but in relevance, further elaboration in the spoiler section). The ensemble was also very good, with some incredibly beautiful and powerful voices and a lot of really cool energy. Noah Bellaart, the Young Rudolf I saw, was also very talented!

Overall, I can just say that this was a really really solid new addition. The cast was excellent, and the sets and costumes (though I missed some small aspects there) were really good. I have some critical points, but I will elaborate those below, because they’re all super spoilery and honestly? I would recommend going into this almost blind. It was really fun to discover the new things they did and the changes they made in the theatre in my seat. So if you’re going to see it? Don’t read this next part, come back once you have. If you just want to live vicariously through my endless rambling; read on:

Spoiler Review

Right. So. SPOILERS TIME. This is going to be not chronological and kind of thematic, so uh, strap in.

Let me start with the big things; this show takes a more abstract approach to some things than the older staging does, filled with different and new metaphors that are really fascinating to me. It is very Dutch in that some things feel a little more toned down, but in ways that I found to be very very interesting. The first big thing is that Lucheni is not questioned by a judge, he is questioned by the Ensemble. They each ask him questions in turn as Sisi is already on stage, lying prone at the centre of a turning section of the stage. As the prologue winds down she is essentially resurrected in front of our eyes and the black mourning clothes are torn off her by the ensemble, before she is tumbled back into her own story. For the entire rest of the show, the Ensemble (when not in specific courtly roles) show up in painters outfits and carrying easels, and paint whatever scene is taking place in front of them. They are, because of this, almost constantly on stage. This fits in really well with the projections/screens they do use, because they are nearly all paintings or drawings of Sisi or the other major characters. Similarly, Sisi, Death and Lucheni also barely ever leave the stage. Like I said, we start with Danique already right there, but she barely ever leaves at all. Because of this painter theme, there is also a large blue ‘person’ puppet that Franz is posing with at some point which was hilarious, especially because Sisi rearranges it comfortably onto a chair later.

This does also lead to one of the things I like less, that is that she has way fewer costumes than is ‘usual’ and runs around in her white ‘nightgown’ for a very large part of Act 1. While I understand the choice (both as a practical one and a symbolic one, it makes her stand out against all the historical costumes around her), I do miss some of her other costumes and I did think it odd she was going to Hungary in her nightgown. It does contrast beautifully with Pia’s black nightgown in Act 2, though.

So, the biggest interesting change for me is probably Elisabeth smokes now. I know she historically did so anyway, but it’s never been in the musical before. If you had told me before I went to see, I would have been very sceptical about it, because it feels like that’s just the thing in all the movies about her right now and I would have worried it was gonna be tacky. It is very much not. Oh, about that, Death also smokes. He has one of those old fashioned stick things that you stick a cigarette into and it is. So much. It really suits him and the smoke creates an excellent effect. And the way they integrated it was just really really cool. So basically he offers her a smoke, a bunch of times, and whether or not she takes it is very intimately related to the state of her mental health. There is the moment after she gives Franz the letter, when he shows up and they sit down on a ledge together and Sisi offers Death a smoke, and something about that image crawled right into my brain and gave me the brainworms. It’s like he’s a personification of all of her bad habits, her bad thoughts; almost less like Death and more a manifestation of self-destruction. It’s really cool and the energy it brings is somehow both way more toned down than some of the big choreographies they’ve had in the past, but also incredibly raw and emotional in a way that gets what they mean across just so, so well.

Danique, as stated, is incredibly capable of showing both Sisi’s strength and her vulnerability. She is very powerful during Ich Gehör nur Mir, and then after baby Sophie’s death there is a sadness and misery to her that I don’t think I’ve seen in that moment in quite that way before. The kind of drag out the moment a tad longer, in more silence than it is in a lot of productions, which means there is a moment where Franz walks in to comfort her and she basically cowers away from him against Sophie’s coffin, raising both her arms and hiding, and it utterly destroyed me.

Pia’s acting is just utterly incredible. Because they get to switch halfway, the power differential between Death and Sisi changes, and that is really something I don’t think I’ve ever experienced quite this starkly. She somehow speaks to Death both as an old friend and an annoying ex, with deep familiarity born of history together. She’s so regal and powerful and there’s something so very sad about her, while also tapping into some of the callousness and dejection really well. She really leaned into the emotion. One of the things I’m not super fond of in Act 2 is that the smoking escalates to her injecting herself with coke, which, again does make sense historically but it was a bit much and I’m not sure that we needed it, and also she does it at the end of Wenn Ich Tanzen Will which is supposed to be her moment of triumph and that felt like it really undercut that.

I fucking loved Nichts, Nichts, but then I always do, because I am just like that. The entire scene in the madhouse was really heartbreaking, and her dress was incredible. She gets a purple dress with black gulls along the skirt, which just was absolutely gorgeous.

Like I said above, Milan as Death was something else. I felt like he really fit in well with the Dutch Death’s tradition; he’s cold and calculating and mean. I didn’t really get a romantic vibe from him with Sisi at all, even though he states lyrically that he loves her. It feels more like wanting to possess her, and honestly he really did feel like more of a manifestation of the depression and the bad habits than anything else. Like that mean voice in your head, the devil on your shoulder. I adore it. He was really fun and bitchy and super fun with Lucheni as well. Also, if smoking is bad for you why does it look so cool (on stage, in real life I actually do think it's disgusting). I also found the choices with his choreography very interesting. He moves around less than a lot of previous Death’s, but in standing imperiously in corners and watching he is somehow incredibly menacing. It was really cool.

As is regular now, Schwarze Prinz is replaced by Kein Kommen Ohne Gehen, and for the first time in ever that didn’t make me want to throw things. Danique and Milan sold it pretty well, even though I do still prefer the other version.

The change from having a judge to having the ensemble question Lucheni also changed his entire relationship with them, which was very interesting. Lucheni seems very ambivalent to Sisi, and the change from him claiming she wanted to die at the beginning of the piece to him admitting that she just Was There at the end is somehow much more prominent like this. William plays him very dark, at times also kind of miserable himself, and while he and Death interact I feel like a little bit less, Lucheni is ALWAYS paying attention to him.

One of the other major changes is Schatten. This one is going to be controversial, I already know that. During the song, both Sisi and Lucheni are on stage in the background. Sisi has just done drugs, and Lucheni is cutting his own chest with a piece of a broken mirror he hurled at Sisi earlier. This, as it is as you can guess, INTENSE, is kind of really distracting from Rudolf. This is what I meant when I said Rudolf’s role is smaller; he’s very much less the focus of the story. Death really doesn’t seem to give a single fuck about him, he’s really just using him for his own gain, and because his big duet with Death is very busy now I found myself unable to focus quite so well on him. He’s still really good, especially in Spiegel, but he’s just drawing a lot less focus. The contrast to this is that Rudolf does just stay on stage for a very long time, in the background of other scenes, before his death. He is lying on the floor on stage when Sisi returns at the beginning of Spiegel. There also isn’t a kiss between him and Death, instead he aims in his mouth as Death just watches on impassively, uncaring as the ensemble lifts and carries him offstage and one of them returns with a candle. Similarly, when Sisi begs him to take her too, he doesn’t even consider it; he just straight up tells her ‘no’ with a cold smile on his face, which is quite a lot less conflicted and angry than he often is in that scene. Basically the entire energy is different, and while I’ve found that I do in fact like it, if Rudolf is your boy then I imagine this entire thing will be disappointing. Usually I’m more up in arms if Death and Rudolf don’t even kiss, but somehow it makes a lot of sense for this version where the ‘romantic’ appeal of Death to the characters seems a lot more absent anyway.

Hass is as disconcerting as always, which was to be expected, but I think they’ve gotten better at integrating it with the story. I have some complicated feelings about Rudolf being the character trying to warn others of n*zis, effectively casting him in a very heroic light, what with the rest of his messy history, but at the same time I think it was important in the current climate to extra emphasise that n*zi’s are BAD (because apparently people don’t just always know that anymore), and having one of the major characters specifically point that out makes the scene read less ambiguously as I know some people have taken it in the past. I don’t like the scene, but I can still acknowledge that it’s important to have in the show.

Am Deck was really well done. Lucheni shows up with fake skulls and starts talking to and about them, and I (because archaeologists are a little weird) found this both incredible funny and a really good addition. The face-off between Death and Franz is really well done, and I really enjoyed it.

The ending felt ominous, not happy, to me, which I really really like. It felt very reminiscent of the 1999 production, which I really enjoy.

Overall the script was largely based on 1999, but I could tell that they have updated it in a variety of ways and I also recognised some of the 2009 Antwerp texts. There are some lyrics that I wish they’d changed but haven’t (we still have to deal with ‘ik houd niet van huichelarij’ which I just think is a silly line), but overall I thought this was a very good translation that’s been updated to the times very well. They also changed ‘muisje’ (mouse) to ‘kikker’ (frog), when Rudolf tells Death what he killed that day, which SURE HELPS WITH NOT HAVING ME MISHEAR IT AS ‘meisje’ (girl). So Thank You to whomever changed that. They also changed something in the lyrics to Letzte Tanz which I really enjoyed. They updated it overall but they did something very fun where the second line went from:

“de laatste dans, de laatste dans, dans ik alleen met jou”

“de laatste dans, de laatste, dans ik alleen met jou”

Which is really fun wordplay if you ask me and Milan pulled it off really well.

Overall, I just have to give this show an absolutely 10/10. Sure there are some choices that I may have made differently, but I am just super excited that they made new choices at all. Absolutely tipping my hat to the entire creative team, the people updating the lyrics, the set design and the cast itself. Thank you for the wonderful experience. I am 100% gonna go see this again.

Oh, and if you want me to ramble on more just ask me questions. I fully must have forgotten some of it already.

#elisabeth das musical #elisabeth de musical #pia douwes #danique dusee #milan van waardenburg #sisi

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